Rape Empathy Scale (RES)

Abstract

The Rape Empathy Scale (RES) is an influential psychometric instrument developed by Sheila R. Deitz, Kathryn T. Blackwell, Patricia C. Daley, and Bobbie J. Bentley in 1982 to operationalize and measure differential affective and cognitive empathy directed toward victims versus perpetrators of sexual assault. While early socio-legal and psychological research predominantly examined overt rape myth acceptance and punitive juror attitudes, the RES was among the first instruments designed to evaluate the underlying affective-cognitive disposition to empathize with either the victim or the rapist in acquaintance, marital, and stranger rape scenarios. Structurally, the instrument was initially conceptualized as a 20-item paired-statement inventory utilizing a forced-choice or graduated agreement format, with Item 15 subsequently eliminated during psychometric refinement, yielding a psychometrically robust 19-item final version. Across each item, paired antithetical statements juxtapose a victim-empathic perspective against a rapist-empathic or victim-blaming perspective. Psychometric analyses from early and contemporary validation studies demonstrate strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging between .84 and .93) and robust test-retest reliability across multi-week intervals (r > .80). Factor analytic investigations have generally supported a predominant primary dimension of rape empathy spanning victim identification versus perpetrator exculpation, alongside secondary dimensions examining judicial skepticism, attribution of trauma, and contextual justification. The RES has proven to be a pivotal predictive tool in forensic psychology, experimental mock-jury deliberations, victimology, and clinical assessments of sexual offenders and community samples, serving as a critical metric for interventions targeting sexual violence reduction and the dismantling of pervasive rape myths.

Keywords

Rape Empathy Scale, victim empathy, rapist empathy, sexual assault, victim blaming, rape myth acceptance, forensic psychology, mock jury decision-making, psychometrics, gender-based violence

Authors

The Rape Empathy Scale was formulated and psychometrically validated by a research team led by Dr. Sheila R. Deitz alongside colleagues Kathryn T. Blackwell, Patricia C. Daley, and Bobbie J. Bentley. At the time of the instrument’s inception and publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1982), the investigators were affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

• Sheila R. Deitz, Ph.D. – Lead investigator; specialist in social psychology, forensic clinical psychology, and juror attribution in violent crimes. Formerly affiliated with the Department of Psychology, University of Missouri–St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
• Kathryn T. Blackwell, M.A. / Ph.D. – Co-author and researcher in social-cognitive attributions of violence against women. Department of Psychology, University of Missouri–St. Louis.
• Patricia C. Daley, M.A. – Co-author and psychometrician specializing in measurement validation and experimental legal psychology. Department of Psychology, University of Missouri–St. Louis.
• Bobbie J. Bentley, B.A. / M.A. – Research collaborator in experimental social psychology and sexual assault victimology. Department of Psychology, University of Missouri–St. Louis.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Rape Empathy Scale is to quantify the relative distribution of an individual’s empathic engagement toward victims of sexual violence versus the perpetrators of such violence. Prior to the construction of the RES in 1982, empirical investigations into societal reactions toward sexual assault leaned heavily on conceptual frameworks such as Melvin Lerner’s Just-World Hypothesis, general measures of authoritarianism, or Martha Burt’s Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (RMA). Although Burt’s RMA successfully measured adherence to false, stereotyped cultural beliefs regarding sexual assault, it primarily operationalized cognitive acceptance of societal falsehoods rather than affective perspective-taking and emotional resonance. Deitz and colleagues identified that legal outcomes, bystander non-intervention, and victim revictimization were profoundly governed not merely by what people cognitively believed about rape laws, but by whom individuals fundamentally identified with when an assault was described.

In forensic and legal settings, the RES was established to examine bias in jury selection and mock-juror evaluations. A chronic failure within adversarial justice systems has been the disparate attribution of credibility: mock jurors frequently scrutinize the complainant’s demeanor, clothing, prior sexual history, and emotional composure while demonstrating unprompted perspective-taking toward the accused’s reputation, professional future, and alleged lack of impulse control. By measuring whether an observer tends to imagine the trauma, shame, and helplessness of the victim, or alternatively the humiliation, frustration, and social ruin of the accused perpetrator, the RES reliably predicts verdicts, recommended sentencing lengths, and perceived complainant credibility in simulated court proceedings.

Beyond experimental jurisprudence, the instrument serves clinical and educational purposes. In correctional and rehabilitative environments, the RES is applied to assess treatment progress among individuals convicted of sexual offenses. A key diagnostic hallmark of sex offending behavior is cognitive distortion paired with severe deficits in victim-directed empathy; measuring shifts on the RES before and after specialized cognitive-behavioral or restorative interventions provides an objective indicator of affective rehabilitative change. In higher education and community contexts, the RES provides primary prevention programs with a standardized baseline and post-intervention outcome measure to evaluate the efficacy of bystander intervention workshops, consent education modules, and violence-prevention curricula.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct operationalized by the RES is rape empathy, defined as a bipolar or differential socio-cognitive and affective disposition that determines the direction and target of an observer’s emotional identification, perspective-taking, and cognitive justification in the context of sexual violence. Rather than viewing empathy as a monolithic, undifferentiated trait, the RES posits that empathy in transgressive, socially contested events is directional and selective.

The construct encompasses several interrelated psychological components:

• Affective Identification and Emotional Resonance: This dimension assesses an individual’s spontaneous emotional resonance with either the victim’s acute terror, physical violation, and enduring trauma, or the perpetrator’s perceived helplessness, social disgrace, and judicial anxiety. For example, items contrast whether a respondent can more readily imagine the helplessness experienced by a woman during a non-consensual assault or the helplessness of a man claimed to be driven by uncontrollable physiological drives.
• Attribution of Blame and Provocation: This facet captures causal attributions regarding whether the sexual assault is viewed as an unprovoked violation of bodily integrity or as an act precipitated by the complainant’s appearance, alcohol consumption, or past sexual history. High victim empathy is characterized by the firm attribution of responsibility solely to the perpetrator, whereas rapist empathy involves diffusing perpetrator accountability onto the victim’s alleged signaling behavior.
• Judicial and Procedural Skepticism: This component targets attitudes toward institutional proceedings, evidentiary standards, and the psychological burdens imposed by the legal system. It differentiates between observers who recognize the extraordinary emotional courage required for a victim to report an assault and those who instinctively worry about the vulnerability of the accused man to false allegations and reputational damage.
• Deconstruction of Coercion and Marital Rights: A critical dimension within the construct involves the conceptualization of consent across varying relational contexts, particularly acquaintance and marital interactions. High victim empathy categorically rejects the notion that past intimacy, romantic commitment, or marriage confers sexual entitlement, recognizing non-consensual sexual acts within marriage as rape.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Rape Empathy Scale is situated at the intersection of social psychology, attribution theory, and feminist psycho-jurisprudence. Three primary theoretical paradigms underpin the scale:

1. Attribution Theory and the Just-World Hypothesis

According to attribution theory (Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1967) and Lerner’s (1980) Just-World Hypothesis, individuals possess a fundamental psychological need to believe that the world is an orderly, predictable, and fair place where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. When confronted with the catastrophic reality of sexual violence, an observer experiences acute cognitive dissonance. If a blameless victim can be brutally violated, the observer must concede their own vulnerability to random, malevolent events. To shield themselves from this existential threat, observers engage in defensive attribution: they reallocate responsibility onto the victim by finding fault in her choices, attire, or demeanor. The RES operationalizes this defensive mechanism by measuring the extent to which an individual endorses statements that exonerate the perpetrator by framing the assault as an understandable consequence of victim behavior.

2. Cognitive and Affective Empathy Models

Drawing on the empathy frameworks formulated by Davis (1980) and Hoffman (1977), empathy entails both a cognitive capacity for perspective-taking (placing oneself in another’s psychological framework) and an affective capacity for sympathetic concern. Deitz and colleagues recognized that in situations involving sexual assault, gender socialization and in-group favoritism heavily bias perspective-taking. Observers frequently demonstrate an egocentric or ingroup-based empathy bias: men may project themselves into the position of the accused perpetrator, contemplating the horror of public accusation and legal retribution, while women are more culturally and experientially primed to adopt the victim’s vantage point. The RES was designed to expose this divergence by forcing respondents to weigh competing affective claims.

3. Feminist Critiques of Rape Culture

The instrument directly operationalizes core concepts from 1970s and 1980s feminist legal and sociological scholarship, notably the work of Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, 1975). Brownmiller and contemporary feminist scholars demonstrated that societal institutions—specifically police departments, legal courts, and psychiatric paradigms—systematically reflected male perspective-taking, treating female bodily autonomy as conditional. The RES measures whether respondents subscribe to traditional patriarchal scripts (e.g., that marital status negates rape, or that sexually active women invite assault) or reject these cultural myths in favor of absolute bodily integrity.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Rape Empathy Scale has been established through extensive empirical investigations spanning laboratory experiments, correlational field studies, and specialized population comparisons.

Construct and Convergent Validity

During its initial validation by Deitz et al. (1982), the RES demonstrated robust convergent validity with established measures of sexual attitudes, gender roles, and rape-related constructs. The scale correlated substantially and negatively with Martha Burt’s Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (RMA) and the Adversarial Sexual Beliefs scale (ASB), with convergent validity coefficients typically exceeding r = -.65 to -.78 (where higher RES scores denote greater victim empathy). Furthermore, the RES correlated significantly with the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1972), demonstrating that individuals with egalitarian gender-role orientations scored markedly higher in victim empathy than individuals harboring traditional or patriarchal values.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by comparing RES performance against general intelligence, general social desirability (e.g., Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), and broad, non-contextual measures of dispositional empathy (such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index; IRI). While the RES exhibited moderate positive correlations with the Perspective Taking and Empathic Concern subscales of the IRI (typically r = .25 to .38), it remained statistically distinct, proving that the scale captures specialized attitudinal and affective biases surrounding sexual assault rather than merely reflecting an undifferentiated trait of emotional sensitivity.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The predictive validity of the RES is among its most thoroughly documented psychometric strengths, particularly in experimental legal and clinical contexts:

• Mock Juror Decision-Making: Numerous studies have utilized the RES to predict verdicts in simulated rape trials. In experimental trials involving acquaintance or date rape scenarios, mock jurors scoring high in victim empathy on the RES were significantly more likely to render guilty verdicts, rate the complainant as highly credible, attribute negligible responsibility to the victim, and recommend substantially longer prison sentences for the defendant compared to low-scoring jurors (Deitz et al., 1982; Deitz, Littman, & Bentley, 1984).
• Distinction of Offender Populations: Clinical validation studies have shown that men convicted of sexual offenses score significantly lower on the RES than non-offender control groups, demonstrating a pronounced bias toward rapist empathy, perpetrator exoneration, and victim derogation.

Reliability

The Rape Empathy Scale demonstrates high psychometric reliability across multiple evaluative parameters, showing stability across temporal administrations and homogeneous internal consistency across diverse demographic cohorts.

Internal Consistency

In the initial psychometric standardization by Deitz et al. (1982), the 19-item version of the scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .86 for the overall sample, with sub-sample alphas of .84 for male respondents and .87 for female respondents. Subsequent independent replications across university and community populations have continually reaffirmed these figures, reporting internal consistency estimates ranging consistently between α = .83 and α = .92. When examined in applied forensic contexts and cross-cultural adaptations, the scale exhibits high item-total correlation values, with nearly all retained items demonstrating corrected item-total correlations exceeding .40.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability was originally evaluated across a four-week test-retest interval. The resulting Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was r = .84 (p < .001), indicating that victim-versus-perpetrator empathy represents a remarkably stable socio-cognitive disposition rather than a transient, state-dependent mood fluctuation. Subsequent longitudinal studies monitoring control groups in educational violence-prevention research have corroborated this temporal stability, reporting 6- to 8-week test-retest reliabilities hovering between .79 and .85 in the absence of targeted educational interventions.

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the Rape Empathy Scale has been investigated using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across numerous empirical studies.

Initial Exploratory Factor Analyses

In the primary psychometric development study by Deitz et al. (1982), an initial pool of 20 items was subjected to principal components analysis (PCA) with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique rotations. The scree test and eigenvalue criteria (λ > 1.0) revealed a dominant first factor accounting for the vast majority of the common variance (over 32% of total variance), which captured generalized victim versus rapist empathy. Item 15 (“If a rape were interrupted, I think the victim would feel more embarrassment than the rapist”) demonstrated an ambiguous loading, cross-loading weakly across disparate factors with a primary factor loading below .30; consequently, Item 15 was permanently dropped from the final psychometric instrument, leaving a refined 19-item scale.

Multidimensional Factor Solutions

While the RES is predominantly scored as a single unidimensional composite reflecting overall victim empathy, multidimensional investigations have identified meaningful sub-factors:

• Factor 1: Perpetrator Accountability vs. Victim Provocation (Items 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 16) – Focuses directly on whether sexual violence is an inexcusable transgression solely the fault of the assailant, or an act precipitated by the victim’s attire, behavior, or perceived sexual availability. Factor loadings for this primary dimension typically span from .55 to .78.
• Factor 2: Affective Identification and Suffering (Items 4, 8, 12, 13, 14, 17) – Captures pure emotional resonance, contrasting the observer’s ability to empathize with the victim’s terror and post-assault trauma against the perpetrator’s shame, trial anxiety, and alleged loss of control. Loadings range from .48 to .72.
• Factor 3: Legal and Contextual Skepticism (Items 2, 11, 18, 19, 20) – Centers on evidentiary standards, marital rape recognition, and the credibility of testimony within institutional legal frameworks. Factor loadings range from .42 to .68.

Confirmatory factor analytic studies evaluating a hierarchical structure (a higher-order Rape Empathy factor subsuming these three correlated first-order dimensions) have demonstrated adequate to good goodness-of-fit indices across diverse populations (CFI > .92, TLI > .90, RMSEA ≤ .06).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Full Instrument Name: Rape Empathy Scale (RES)
• Developers / Authors: Sheila R. Deitz, Kathryn T. Blackwell, Patricia C. Daley, and Bobbie J. Bentley (1982)
• Construct Measured: Differential affective and cognitive empathy directed toward rape victims versus rapists / perpetrators of sexual assault
• Test Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire
• Number of Items: 20 items originally presented in paired-statement format; 19 items retained in the psychometrically validated final instrument (Item 15 eliminated due to poor psychometric loading)
• Item Presentation: Each item consists of paired contradictory statements: one representing a victim-empathic perspective (designated in scoring manuals with an asterisk) and the other representing a rapist-empathic or victim-blaming perspective.
• Response and Scoring Formats:
  • Forced-Choice Dichotomous Scoring: Respondents select either Statement (a) or Statement (b). Selecting the victim-empathic statement earns 1 point; selecting the rapist-empathic statement earns 0 points (Total Score range: 0 to 19).
  • 6-Point Agreement Continuum: In the expanded rating format, participants evaluate statements on a 6-point Likert-type continuum ranging from Strongly agree (1) to Strongly disagree (6) (or rate preference between alternative statements from 1 to 6), allowing for nuanced assessment of attitudinal strength.
• Scoring Direction: High aggregate scores reflect strong victim empathy and low adherence to rape myths; low aggregate scores reflect high rapist empathy, victim blaming, and perpetrator exoneration.
• Target Population: Adults and late adolescents (ages 17+); mock jurors, college students, community cohorts, and forensic/offender clinical populations.
• Completion Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Rape Empathy Scale was initially published in 1982 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a journal published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The scale was placed in the public academic domain for non-commercial scholarly and educational research purposes by its authors and is cataloged in standard research compendiums, including the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) compendium of violence against women measures (Flood, 2008). No licensing fee is required for non-profit academic research, university teaching, or clinical evaluation. Researchers wishing to reproduce the scale within commercial publications, testing platforms, or fee-for-service clinical assessment batteries should obtain formal copyright clearance from the American Psychological Association.

References

• Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against our will: Men, women and rape. Simon & Schuster.
• Burt, M. R. (1980). Cultural myths and supports for rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(2), 217–230. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.38.2.217
• Davis, M. H. (1980). A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 10, 85.
• Deitz, S. R., Blackwell, K. T., Daley, P. C., & Bentley, B. J. (1982). Measurement of empathy toward rape victims and rapists. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43(2), 372–384. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.43.2.372
• Deitz, S. R., Littman, M., & Bentley, B. J. (1984). Attribution of responsibility for rape: The influence of observer’s empathy and the rape situation. The Journal of Psychology, 118(1), 75–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1984.9923661
• Flood, M. (2008). Measures for the assessment of dimensions of violence against women: A compendium (pp. 29–31). Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse / Sexual Violence Research Initiative. http://www.svri.org/measures.pdf
• Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000
• Hoffman, M. L. (1977). Empathy, its development and prosocial implications. In C. B. Keasey (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 25, pp. 169–217). University of Nebraska Press.
• Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192–238). University of Nebraska Press.
• Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0448-5
• Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. (1972). The Attitudes Toward Women Scale: An objective instrument to measure attitudes toward the rights and roles of women in contemporary society. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 2, 66–67.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)